Best Picture (redux): 1980s

This story is the second in a three-part series called Best Picture (redux), a historical revision of the Best Picture nominees and winners from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

The selection of Driving Miss Daisy as Best Picture in 1989 is about Hollywood, racism and how the former views the latter. The Academy and its voters believe that if white people are nice to their help — Driving Miss Daisy, Crash and The Help — then they couldn’t possibly be racist. It is enlightenment through condescension.

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing — the best film of 1989 and the best film ever made about race in America — was not nominated for Best Picture.

While Do the Right Thing won the best picture awards presented by the Los Angeles and Chicago film critics and Roger Ebert said it “empathized with all the participants,” others saw it as an incendiary device. On the Criterion DVD of the film, Lee points out that New York magazine’s Joe Klein lamented the death of Sal’s Pizzeria but not that of a young black man killed by the police.

Cut to 2016, when advanced technology presented continuous and unequivocal proof of rampant unnecessary police violence against black people, when America had to be reminded that black lives matter, when America elected Donald Trump as President.

Unfortunately, Do the Right Thing is timeless.

When Buggin’ Out asks the timeless question — “How come you ain’t got no brothers up on the wall?” — the camera cuts to black and white photographs of Italian Americans: Academy Award winners like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. “Boycott Sal’s,” Buggin’ Out yells as Mookie (played by Lee himself) leads him out of the pizzeria.

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